A lot of the online commentary I hear is that “the Indian government is practising censorship!” or “With problems like poverty and corruption, the Indian government thinks preventing movie downloads is more important!”

The Indian government has nothing to do with it. India, like many democracies, has separation of powers between the legislature and the judiciary. As this was a court order issued under existing laws of India, where exactly does the question of “the government” censoring the Internet come in?

I don’t believe in the way Anonymous’s hive mind goes about picking it targets. That said, a lot of its targets in the past – while targetted through technically illegal methods – could still be said to be somewhat “morally pardonable”. Perhaps Sony deserved it for adopting poor security practices…but none of the users of the PlayStation Network deserved to have their personal financial details released. Anyway, more often than not, Anonymous have indulged in what can objectively be called vandalism with quite a sense of self-entitlement.

Don’t forget that India’s a country where copyright violation and piracy is de facto. Anonymous’s hive mind seems to lashing out with the same twisted logic and sense of self-entitlement that it typically does. More tellingly, a lot of the outrage that I see online is of people being unable to access pirated content in the guise of “Internet censorship” than anything else. You know what’s going to happen once the dust settles? These actions are going to fast-track even more restrictive IT laws that have allowed such a court order to be issued in the first place.

What would help is to resort to measures within the existing judicial system to see how such a far-reaching court order was issued in the first place (my understanding of the Indian IT Act is it does indeed allows this), and lobby for free-er Internet laws.

Yeah. Like that’s going to happen now after giving the government a reason to enact even tougher laws.